While I understand the issue on the waiting period, do you really have much of a problem with the safety test? If someone can't pass a basic test that says that kids shouldn't play with guns and the best way to hold a gun when it's not being used is with the barrel pointed up, they shouldn't be handling guns.
There is no link that says that we put out 10 times as much CO2 as volcanoes, because that statement is wrong, but not in the way that you think. The difference is much, much higher.
A 1991 study[1] put the annual volcanic contribution of atmospheric CO2 at 4E12 mol/year, or 176 million tons. Annual worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are around 27 billion metric tons; the US power industry alone produces more than 2.4 billion tons.[2] The factor between worldwide volcanic and human emissions of CO2 is actually around 150.
You're picking a single point. I'm talking about the entire spectrum of issues.
As far as purchasing a gun, it's really not that hard.
1. Go to gun store. 2. Select weapon of choice. 3. If it's a handgun, present valid handgun safety card. If no valid card, take really easy test after being given study pamphlet with the answers. 4. Wait 240 hours for background check and "cool-down" period. 5. Pay for purchase at gun store. 6. Take weapon home.
There are a lot of limitations of what you can buy -- the pistol has to be classified safe, no assault rifles based on the definition in California law, etc. -- but the process itself is not that bad.
I've always found it pretty ironic that the most liberal state in the country runs the most atrocious prison system. How'd that happen?
California isn't quite the liberal sinkhole that most people think it to be. While I do enjoy banging on the liberal legislators here on a fairly frequent basis for the stupid ideas that come from them, there are plenty of conservative legislators with stupid ideas. It's just that the districts were drawn in such a way that there is a guaranteed number of Republican and Democrat seats in the legislature, so the stupid conservative ideas don't get nearly as much play. This will hopefully change with the 2010 census and following redistricting, but I'm not willing to bet on that just yet.
What California does have to even things out is the initiative process. While some argue that it is an abused mechanism with more than 350 initiatives put in front of voters in the past 27 years (including one instance when 29 initiatives appeared on one ballot in November 1998), it does help to balance against the Legislature, which has only had the current locked-in balance since this decade's redistricting. We are a state whose population is generally in favor of weakening marijuana laws, but wants to tax cigarettes; wants lower taxes, but is in favor of stiff sentences for multiple offenders; and hates Republicans in national office but largely supports its own moderate brand of Republican in executive positions, to the degree that Democrats that want to hold such office cannot be very liberal.
The Legislature is facing a serious problem because of this. The populace wants no tax increases (and in fact wants them cut after they were raised this summer), but doesn't want to release prisoners to cut the budget, and in fact has threatened recalls of several legislators on both sides of the aisle over plans to do so. However, the state is under a federal court order to reduce the adult prison inmate population by 40,000 to 110,000 in order to alleviate the problems with delivering medical care to a system that is holding more than twice its design capacity. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.
That's not always true. I know a couple of people who are quite bright, very good at math, and spend multiple weekends a year in Las Vegas. They're reasonably good at poker, enough to come home with a few thousand dollars profit on occasion, but they don't go for the money. They go for the excitement of gambling and the enjoyment of the game.
There are a lot of posts here from people who seem to picture players at the tables as just desperate for money. Everyone who hasn't read a gambling book in the last few weeks knows that the odds are against the player, and that the casinos are going to come out ahead most of the time. A lot of people go to the tables in spite of this. There's often a thrill to gambling, and a lot of people enjoy it. (That thrill gets some of those people in trouble, too, but that's beside the point.) There is also the competition with other players in games such as poker where the house has no edge, but merely collects a percentage of winnings or a regular fee to play.
Some of my friends have, for economic reasons, made extensive use of buses over the years. They despise them for the quality of the ride, the amount of time it takes, and the type and sanitary condition of the other people that ride them. It's been many years since I've taken a bus myself, but having dropped them off or picked them up from the bus stations, I'm inclined to believe my friends' tales.
They were examples of travel that I sometimes undertake that are not at all unusual. The trip from Union Station to Oakland is on a single train (the Coast Starlight). Amtrak has other offers, but they involve either being on a bus for three hours from Los Angeles to Bakersfield before taking a six-hour train to Oakland (with only 15 minutes to get from the bus to the train) or a five-hour bus ride to San Luis Obispo before taking a six-hour train ride to Oakland.
I'm not aiming at the concept of train travel -- like I said, I would love to try this. I'm taking a shot at the implementation in the US. It's not an inexpensive consideration, as I mentioned. If I had a travel companion for the Dallas trip, it might justify a "Superliner Roomette" (basically a private compartment with fold-down beds), but total fare for the both of us goes from $236 ($118 each) to $513 (basic fare plus $277). Going with a bedroom (private room with private toilet and shower), the fare rises to $1004 (basic fare plus $768).
This is in each direction. A round trip for two people would be $236 for reserved coach seats, $1026 for roomette, or $2008 for a bedroom. To be fair, the roomette and bedroom fares include meals and water, but this is a rate of $500 per day per person. I can fly to Dallas with a companion round-trip non-stop for about $500, stay four nights at a nice hotel for $150 per night, spend $50 per person per day in food, and rent a car at $30 per day, and still come in at $1720. That's not much more, in comparison to the freedom one has, than the roomette rate, and leaves nearly $300 from the bedroom rate for whatever other things we would want to do around Dallas.
Just for reference, I looked up a trip from Los Angeles to New York City via the Southwest Chief to Chicago and a transfer to the Lake Shore Limited to New York. It's three days and fares range from $758 ($379 base fare per person, no AAA discount) for coach seats to $1474 for a roomette to $2124 for a bedroom, again in each direction. That's $4248 for two people to spend six days traveling to and from Penn Station in NYC. Again, airfare at $250 each plus hotel at $150 per night is going to undercut this.
As for air travel, it takes me about 30-45 minutes to drive to LAX Airport, and I usually arrive about an hour or so before my flight. I do this anywhere from five to ten times per year. Once at the destination, I'm usually off the plane, out of the airport and on my way in less than 20 minutes if I'm being picked up, or 40 minutes if I'm renting a car.
I believe elrous0 was referring to the timeline of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, wherein all the dolphins leave Earth just before the Vogons destroy it.
Yep. It's a $40 billion, 30-year project to build a train that will get from San Diego to San Francisco in under four hours.
Except that San Francisco has said that it can't terminate there, and land prices and structures may force it to go around the Los Angeles area. And there are stops on such a frequent basis that the train will be spending as much time in acceleration/deceleration as it will be at cruise speed, possibly extending the trip to as much as ten hours -- a little slower than the eight hours it takes to drive it, and a lot slower than the three hours that air travel would take. Oh, and the $40 billion cost will be funded by bonds (the first quarter is what was approved by voters), with the expected cost to the state to pay them off to be around $80 billion.
"Obviously" has drifted into everyday corporate parlance, and it's very irritating to me. It is the audible equivalent of the long-running lose/loose spelling issue across the Internet -- I just notice it every time. We have sales people come in that are demonstrating products we've never seen before, and they talk about how their product can "obviously" perform some function. If it were obvious that it did all of these things, we wouldn't have them here. And it comes across as demeaning, because we didn't know those features were included, but by saying that they "obviously" were there and yet we were ignorant of them, it comes across as suggesting that we didn't do our homework or weren't bright enough to realize how superior their product was.
I have stopped one in mid-sentence and pointed out this problem. To his credit, he tried to avoid the word, and caught himself using it several more times, correcting himself each time. I should try that on more of them.
Air travel is less expensive than rail in most cases for me. I'd love to take a train to my most common destinations of Dallas and Kansas City, even a straight shot on the Texas Eagle from Union Station in Los Angeles to Dallas is showing up as a 48-hour trip costing $118 each direction using a AAA discount. The seats do look more comfortable than an airline seat, but being cooped up on a train for two days won't sit well with me.
Even going up to San Francisco is difficult. Taking a train from Union Station to Oakland is 11 hours, followed by a bus to San Francisco running almost an hour, and costs $52 each way. I can drive up there and back for less than the cost of a rental car and gas, or I can fly up for about the same price while landing in SFO, with a flight time of barely over an hour.
When it takes 12 hours to make a trip I can drive in seven and fly in three (factoring in drive to the airport and security delays), I'll gladly save the time for a bit of hassle.
I've only seen and heard 'bang' refer to an exclamation point. I had not, however, heard of octothorp, and while I have in the last year or so begun referring to it as hash, I may well start using that to annoy people. Thank you.:)
There has to be knowledge of the identity of the other person, and an intentional attempt to directly contact that other person. A lack of knowledge will usually be an allowed defense in the court if the restrainee immediately ceases contact and leaves the area upon gaining that knowledge. Bidding to the same auction house would probably be allowed if the only communication actually was to the auction house, and the requisite distance is maintained, though if it's in the same building the courts may admonish the restrainee for remaining at risk of violating the proximity order.
In this particular case, the court is probably allowed to presume that the restrainee was actively using the Facebook account, though the defendant would be allowed to present affirmative evidence that she was not. Merely saying that it might not have been her isn't likely to work.
I do remember when cable was new. Two of the main draws for my family in California were WTBS (Atlanta) and WGN (Chicago), which were some of the earliest non-premium channels I can remember. (They showed the Braves and the Cubs, respectively, and I watched baseball all the time back then.) Also available, but rarely watched, was WWOR out of New Jersey/NYC. There were the same amount of ads as on local broadcast channels on all three of them, some of them for things not available in California.
The premium channels like HBO and Showtime have been largely without commercials outside of filler material until the next convenient timing for a movie start, usually (but not always) at one of the 15-minute marks.
It shouldn't be, IMHO. I was attempting to refute the idea that Obama has made the world more peaceful than under the previous administration by pointing out that very little has changed in the military policy of the United States.
The pace of missile strikes by US drones against Taleban targets in Afghanistan has picked up since January. There's a good chance that 40,000 to 60,000 more US troops will be deployed to Afghanistan. The military option against Iran's nuclear program is still not off the table. What exactly has been more peaceful? US troop withdrawal from cities in Iraq? That was negotiated under Bush, and would have been carried out whether it was Obama or McCain in the White House.
Aside from the mentioned instance of party politics, do you expect a representative to do that which the electing constituents want, or what the representative believes is in the best interests of the people? If the former, by which fraction does one decide? Is 50%+1 sufficient to support a position, or does it have to be a more significant majority? If the latter, should it be based on the best interests of the people of the electing district, or of the superset of districts (e.g., should a state legislative representative vote in favor of something believed to be good for the state even if it is not the best option for the represented district)?
I work at a county in SoCal that had to cut back its budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year by 18%. That's a cut from what was spent last year, not from the budget that was anticipated for this year. That was just the initial budget, too. We were recently told that further cutbacks are coming, because property tax revenues are down sharply from what was expected. This does not include any further cuts from an expected mid-year budget session to cut the state budget even further.
Building a subway doesn't require much eminent domain aside from the surface stations, and those can be quite small. Freeways wipe out anything through their path.
Second levels are hard to do. First you have to get support for building that second level. Ever since the collapse of a portion of the Nimitz Freeway in the 1986 Loma Prieta earthquake, where 42 of the 57 fatalities attributed to the quake occurred, Californians have been haunted by the images of the cars that were crushed, their occupants killed. Despite a far better understanding of the effects of seismic waves on such structures, this has led to the refusal of voters to support such projects, and occasional threats of recall of politicians that support them.
As for the cost, in 1991, the estimated cost of double-decking a portion of I-5 running only a few miles was around $1 billion. Elevating a 10-mile stretch of the 91 from the 241 to I-15 is estimated to have a price tag of $4 billion -- if it can get past all of the legal hurdles and the certain political challenges.
if you're willing to spend 45 billion dollars you can add lanes pretty much indefinitely
Not really, no. At least not in California. New freeways here cost $1 billion per mile, and that was an estimate from ten years ago. A project to add one lane in each direction to the 91 freeway between the 71 (a freeway) and 241 (a tollway) is nearly $100 million for a mere five miles, and that's in an area where not much has to happen in the way of eminent domain. When you get into city areas with houses and businesses, the numbers skyrocket.
Oh, no. That was the bond measure for the first part of it. The cleverly-written initiative left that part out unless you looked at it very closely.
Also, it's not supposed to go fully online until at least [i]2030[/i], and that's without factoring in any construction or litigation delays. Most people familiar with the project believe a more realistic timeline is 2040, if it ever gets that far.
This is not at all new. Go listen to the radio ads of the 1930s and 1940s, or watch some of the sponsored programs of the 1950s. Look at newspaper ads from before those eras.
Advertising has been about manipulating people into buying things for much longer than you seem to think. Why else do you think breakfast cereals have had mascots for so long? Manipulate the kids into begging for it enough, and a lot of parents are going to break down and buy it.
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While I understand the issue on the waiting period, do you really have much of a problem with the safety test? If someone can't pass a basic test that says that kids shouldn't play with guns and the best way to hold a gun when it's not being used is with the barrel pointed up, they shouldn't be handling guns.
There is no link that says that we put out 10 times as much CO2 as volcanoes, because that statement is wrong, but not in the way that you think. The difference is much, much higher.
A 1991 study[1] put the annual volcanic contribution of atmospheric CO2 at 4E12 mol/year, or 176 million tons. Annual worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are around 27 billion metric tons; the US power industry alone produces more than 2.4 billion tons.[2] The factor between worldwide volcanic and human emissions of CO2 is actually around 150.
[1] Gerlach, T.M., 1991, Present-day CO2 emissions from volcanoes: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (EOS))
[2] http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html
You're picking a single point. I'm talking about the entire spectrum of issues.
As far as purchasing a gun, it's really not that hard.
1. Go to gun store.
2. Select weapon of choice.
3. If it's a handgun, present valid handgun safety card. If no valid card, take really easy test after being given study pamphlet with the answers.
4. Wait 240 hours for background check and "cool-down" period.
5. Pay for purchase at gun store.
6. Take weapon home.
There are a lot of limitations of what you can buy -- the pistol has to be classified safe, no assault rifles based on the definition in California law, etc. -- but the process itself is not that bad.
I've always found it pretty ironic that the most liberal state in the country runs the most atrocious prison system. How'd that happen?
California isn't quite the liberal sinkhole that most people think it to be. While I do enjoy banging on the liberal legislators here on a fairly frequent basis for the stupid ideas that come from them, there are plenty of conservative legislators with stupid ideas. It's just that the districts were drawn in such a way that there is a guaranteed number of Republican and Democrat seats in the legislature, so the stupid conservative ideas don't get nearly as much play. This will hopefully change with the 2010 census and following redistricting, but I'm not willing to bet on that just yet.
What California does have to even things out is the initiative process. While some argue that it is an abused mechanism with more than 350 initiatives put in front of voters in the past 27 years (including one instance when 29 initiatives appeared on one ballot in November 1998), it does help to balance against the Legislature, which has only had the current locked-in balance since this decade's redistricting. We are a state whose population is generally in favor of weakening marijuana laws, but wants to tax cigarettes; wants lower taxes, but is in favor of stiff sentences for multiple offenders; and hates Republicans in national office but largely supports its own moderate brand of Republican in executive positions, to the degree that Democrats that want to hold such office cannot be very liberal.
The Legislature is facing a serious problem because of this. The populace wants no tax increases (and in fact wants them cut after they were raised this summer), but doesn't want to release prisoners to cut the budget, and in fact has threatened recalls of several legislators on both sides of the aisle over plans to do so. However, the state is under a federal court order to reduce the adult prison inmate population by 40,000 to 110,000 in order to alleviate the problems with delivering medical care to a system that is holding more than twice its design capacity. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.
Original reporting from 09 Feb 09: Microsoft Update Slips In a Firefox Extension
Follow-up with removal instructions from 05 Jun 09: MS Issued a Fix For Its Unwanted FireFox Extension
The second article notes that the fix was actually issued in early May.
True. They play plenty of other games, too -- craps is the most commonly discussed. They just spend the most time at poker.
That's not always true. I know a couple of people who are quite bright, very good at math, and spend multiple weekends a year in Las Vegas. They're reasonably good at poker, enough to come home with a few thousand dollars profit on occasion, but they don't go for the money. They go for the excitement of gambling and the enjoyment of the game.
There are a lot of posts here from people who seem to picture players at the tables as just desperate for money. Everyone who hasn't read a gambling book in the last few weeks knows that the odds are against the player, and that the casinos are going to come out ahead most of the time. A lot of people go to the tables in spite of this. There's often a thrill to gambling, and a lot of people enjoy it. (That thrill gets some of those people in trouble, too, but that's beside the point.) There is also the competition with other players in games such as poker where the house has no edge, but merely collects a percentage of winnings or a regular fee to play.
Some of my friends have, for economic reasons, made extensive use of buses over the years. They despise them for the quality of the ride, the amount of time it takes, and the type and sanitary condition of the other people that ride them. It's been many years since I've taken a bus myself, but having dropped them off or picked them up from the bus stations, I'm inclined to believe my friends' tales.
They were examples of travel that I sometimes undertake that are not at all unusual. The trip from Union Station to Oakland is on a single train (the Coast Starlight). Amtrak has other offers, but they involve either being on a bus for three hours from Los Angeles to Bakersfield before taking a six-hour train to Oakland (with only 15 minutes to get from the bus to the train) or a five-hour bus ride to San Luis Obispo before taking a six-hour train ride to Oakland.
I'm not aiming at the concept of train travel -- like I said, I would love to try this. I'm taking a shot at the implementation in the US. It's not an inexpensive consideration, as I mentioned. If I had a travel companion for the Dallas trip, it might justify a "Superliner Roomette" (basically a private compartment with fold-down beds), but total fare for the both of us goes from $236 ($118 each) to $513 (basic fare plus $277). Going with a bedroom (private room with private toilet and shower), the fare rises to $1004 (basic fare plus $768).
This is in each direction. A round trip for two people would be $236 for reserved coach seats, $1026 for roomette, or $2008 for a bedroom. To be fair, the roomette and bedroom fares include meals and water, but this is a rate of $500 per day per person. I can fly to Dallas with a companion round-trip non-stop for about $500, stay four nights at a nice hotel for $150 per night, spend $50 per person per day in food, and rent a car at $30 per day, and still come in at $1720. That's not much more, in comparison to the freedom one has, than the roomette rate, and leaves nearly $300 from the bedroom rate for whatever other things we would want to do around Dallas.
Just for reference, I looked up a trip from Los Angeles to New York City via the Southwest Chief to Chicago and a transfer to the Lake Shore Limited to New York. It's three days and fares range from $758 ($379 base fare per person, no AAA discount) for coach seats to $1474 for a roomette to $2124 for a bedroom, again in each direction. That's $4248 for two people to spend six days traveling to and from Penn Station in NYC. Again, airfare at $250 each plus hotel at $150 per night is going to undercut this.
As for air travel, it takes me about 30-45 minutes to drive to LAX Airport, and I usually arrive about an hour or so before my flight. I do this anywhere from five to ten times per year. Once at the destination, I'm usually off the plane, out of the airport and on my way in less than 20 minutes if I'm being picked up, or 40 minutes if I'm renting a car.
It's just no contest.
I believe elrous0 was referring to the timeline of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, wherein all the dolphins leave Earth just before the Vogons destroy it.
Yep. It's a $40 billion, 30-year project to build a train that will get from San Diego to San Francisco in under four hours.
Except that San Francisco has said that it can't terminate there, and land prices and structures may force it to go around the Los Angeles area. And there are stops on such a frequent basis that the train will be spending as much time in acceleration/deceleration as it will be at cruise speed, possibly extending the trip to as much as ten hours -- a little slower than the eight hours it takes to drive it, and a lot slower than the three hours that air travel would take. Oh, and the $40 billion cost will be funded by bonds (the first quarter is what was approved by voters), with the expected cost to the state to pay them off to be around $80 billion.
"Obviously" has drifted into everyday corporate parlance, and it's very irritating to me. It is the audible equivalent of the long-running lose/loose spelling issue across the Internet -- I just notice it every time. We have sales people come in that are demonstrating products we've never seen before, and they talk about how their product can "obviously" perform some function. If it were obvious that it did all of these things, we wouldn't have them here. And it comes across as demeaning, because we didn't know those features were included, but by saying that they "obviously" were there and yet we were ignorant of them, it comes across as suggesting that we didn't do our homework or weren't bright enough to realize how superior their product was.
I have stopped one in mid-sentence and pointed out this problem. To his credit, he tried to avoid the word, and caught himself using it several more times, correcting himself each time. I should try that on more of them.
Air travel is less expensive than rail in most cases for me. I'd love to take a train to my most common destinations of Dallas and Kansas City, even a straight shot on the Texas Eagle from Union Station in Los Angeles to Dallas is showing up as a 48-hour trip costing $118 each direction using a AAA discount. The seats do look more comfortable than an airline seat, but being cooped up on a train for two days won't sit well with me.
Even going up to San Francisco is difficult. Taking a train from Union Station to Oakland is 11 hours, followed by a bus to San Francisco running almost an hour, and costs $52 each way. I can drive up there and back for less than the cost of a rental car and gas, or I can fly up for about the same price while landing in SFO, with a flight time of barely over an hour.
When it takes 12 hours to make a trip I can drive in seven and fly in three (factoring in drive to the airport and security delays), I'll gladly save the time for a bit of hassle.
I've only seen and heard 'bang' refer to an exclamation point. I had not, however, heard of octothorp, and while I have in the last year or so begun referring to it as hash, I may well start using that to annoy people. Thank you. :)
There has to be knowledge of the identity of the other person, and an intentional attempt to directly contact that other person. A lack of knowledge will usually be an allowed defense in the court if the restrainee immediately ceases contact and leaves the area upon gaining that knowledge. Bidding to the same auction house would probably be allowed if the only communication actually was to the auction house, and the requisite distance is maintained, though if it's in the same building the courts may admonish the restrainee for remaining at risk of violating the proximity order.
In this particular case, the court is probably allowed to presume that the restrainee was actively using the Facebook account, though the defendant would be allowed to present affirmative evidence that she was not. Merely saying that it might not have been her isn't likely to work.
I do remember when cable was new. Two of the main draws for my family in California were WTBS (Atlanta) and WGN (Chicago), which were some of the earliest non-premium channels I can remember. (They showed the Braves and the Cubs, respectively, and I watched baseball all the time back then.) Also available, but rarely watched, was WWOR out of New Jersey/NYC. There were the same amount of ads as on local broadcast channels on all three of them, some of them for things not available in California.
The premium channels like HBO and Showtime have been largely without commercials outside of filler material until the next convenient timing for a movie start, usually (but not always) at one of the 15-minute marks.
It shouldn't be, IMHO. I was attempting to refute the idea that Obama has made the world more peaceful than under the previous administration by pointing out that very little has changed in the military policy of the United States.
The pace of missile strikes by US drones against Taleban targets in Afghanistan has picked up since January. There's a good chance that 40,000 to 60,000 more US troops will be deployed to Afghanistan. The military option against Iran's nuclear program is still not off the table. What exactly has been more peaceful? US troop withdrawal from cities in Iraq? That was negotiated under Bush, and would have been carried out whether it was Obama or McCain in the White House.
Aside from the mentioned instance of party politics, do you expect a representative to do that which the electing constituents want, or what the representative believes is in the best interests of the people? If the former, by which fraction does one decide? Is 50%+1 sufficient to support a position, or does it have to be a more significant majority? If the latter, should it be based on the best interests of the people of the electing district, or of the superset of districts (e.g., should a state legislative representative vote in favor of something believed to be good for the state even if it is not the best option for the represented district)?
It doesn't have to be removed. It only needs to be chipped away a little bit, and that's if they don't narrow the lanes.
I work at a county in SoCal that had to cut back its budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year by 18%. That's a cut from what was spent last year, not from the budget that was anticipated for this year. That was just the initial budget, too. We were recently told that further cutbacks are coming, because property tax revenues are down sharply from what was expected. This does not include any further cuts from an expected mid-year budget session to cut the state budget even further.
Building a subway doesn't require much eminent domain aside from the surface stations, and those can be quite small. Freeways wipe out anything through their path.
Second levels are hard to do. First you have to get support for building that second level. Ever since the collapse of a portion of the Nimitz Freeway in the 1986 Loma Prieta earthquake, where 42 of the 57 fatalities attributed to the quake occurred, Californians have been haunted by the images of the cars that were crushed, their occupants killed. Despite a far better understanding of the effects of seismic waves on such structures, this has led to the refusal of voters to support such projects, and occasional threats of recall of politicians that support them.
As for the cost, in 1991, the estimated cost of double-decking a portion of I-5 running only a few miles was around $1 billion. Elevating a 10-mile stretch of the 91 from the 241 to I-15 is estimated to have a price tag of $4 billion -- if it can get past all of the legal hurdles and the certain political challenges.
Not really, no. At least not in California. New freeways here cost $1 billion per mile, and that was an estimate from ten years ago. A project to add one lane in each direction to the 91 freeway between the 71 (a freeway) and 241 (a tollway) is nearly $100 million for a mere five miles, and that's in an area where not much has to happen in the way of eminent domain. When you get into city areas with houses and businesses, the numbers skyrocket.
Oh, no. That was the bond measure for the first part of it. The cleverly-written initiative left that part out unless you looked at it very closely.
Also, it's not supposed to go fully online until at least [i]2030[/i], and that's without factoring in any construction or litigation delays. Most people familiar with the project believe a more realistic timeline is 2040, if it ever gets that far.
This is not at all new. Go listen to the radio ads of the 1930s and 1940s, or watch some of the sponsored programs of the 1950s. Look at newspaper ads from before those eras.
Advertising has been about manipulating people into buying things for much longer than you seem to think. Why else do you think breakfast cereals have had mascots for so long? Manipulate the kids into begging for it enough, and a lot of parents are going to break down and buy it.